House player has too many games?

Running Chess Tournaments
1

I’m trying to submit the results for my weekly tournament, and I have an error I’ve never seen before and don’t understand.

I had 19 players. Fortunately, there was a man in the restaurant who had been a member and had played one tournament before his membership expired four years ago, and he agreed to be a house player. So he played a game in each round to make an even 20. I found him online, and he had a rating of 101 — which worked out well since eight of my players were unrated.

When I tried to submit the tournament, I got an error:
House player (#14) has too many games (3, max: 2)

Am I reading this right? Is this saying that a house player can only play in two rounds and that I have to have an odd number or find a different house player for the other rounds. I can’t believe that. What am I doing wrong?

2

There used to be a way to override this, I’m not sure how to do that on MUIR. I’ve forwarded this on to the ratings staff and the programmers for their advice.

Have you tried submitting it to see if it goes into a ‘needs approval’ state?

The other idea that comes to mind is to create a 2nd house player with the same ID (ie, 2 different pairing numbers) and split the games between those pairing numbers.

They’d get aggregated for ratings purposes.

Mike Nolan

3

When I submit it, I get the message:
1 restricted values found

Restricted values must be approved by USCF.
For more detail, see validation report

I took your advice and I went ahead and submitted it and it’s waiting for the USCF to review it and approve it.

But going back to the actual error. Is that a rule about house players that I’m not aware of? Are they only supposed to be able to fill in for up to two rounds?

4

Mostly that’s a rule to keep TDs from putting someone in as a house player and having them eligible for prizes, since a house player is in the event for the convenience of the other players. I’m not sure it’s implemented in the validation code the same way on MUIR as it was on TD/A, though. This is the first one I’ve heard about, but I don’t handle the approvals on submitted events.

5

It doesn’t seem to be. I never had any issues with a single house player for a 4 round event before MUIR.

6

I’m a bit confused. Isn’t the issue with the fact that the house player is a non-member? How would it know that a MEMBER was acting as a house player?

7

All house players have to have US Chess IDs; the only difference is that their membership doesn’t have to be current.

Rule 28M1 doesn’t say this, mind you, but that does seem to be how the checks are implemented.

8

Maybe I’m mis-interpreting the error message:

image
image1318×506 35.6 KB

But I submitted the tournament with the error and I’m waiting for it to be reviewed.

9

Sorry. I meant non-member in the sense of having an expired membership.

10

Yeah, the system has an option to indicate “house player” during the report process.

image
image551×227 11.5 KB